Category Archives: wood and water

This is the first of three posts, about a Tarot reading just after midsummer this year. The oracle opened up (as usual) a contemplation including and far transcending the strange local event which triggered it. Those private and universal threads continue to flow, and only now have I time to collect and edit them together.. You may not want to read it all, but dip here and there in the lake for possible echoes ! The Hanging Man and the Tower (reflecting one another) are traditionally the least popular cards in the deck; but what profound alchemical treasure they reveal …

Here is part One – Journal 23 June 2018

Keep cool. The cracks flowed richly together, like the Golden Net all over Gaia. Contemplate this fact. Watch the space. Love the space – that means embrace it, keeping still. Let the sea of it flow through, and reflect the way of martial art to deftly step aside, forgive, give way to the force.

I am shown what the Higher Power electrifies in my soul and centre of gravity. Peace.

The problem for me, is that yesterday’s serendipitous encounter with a violent stranger may generate enemies and their own trains. The answer is that everywhere in life there is risk or apparent risk; and when the soul is focused, she navigates with place, time and precision. Keep thinking Golden Net and the crisscrossing delta traces in sand. Time and space with this event in my soul gives it digestion.

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Digestion is alchemical – assimilation means conversion to energy – and I am reminded of Tarot Key 8 and the Heracles with Lion in a cave, which Midi Berry sent me.

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Master R, what is your view?

Tarot Keys to reflect … my method is to shuffle the deck, wait a moment for the lake to quieten, then cut the deck with left hand and repeat three times (no need to reshuffle). This reading is with just the 22 Major Arcana. From the three piles face down, turn over the centre top card, and then the ones to the right and left. The first card is the reading’s YOD or intention. The ones to each side enhance or qualify its character.

From the first card, turn over the three cards underneath it in the pile. They represent H, V, H of Tetragrammaton YHVH. Y (Yod) is the father, H (Heh) is the mother, V (Vav) is the child and H (second Heh) is the family of the first three in its concerted action, decay or momentum. It contains and generates within it a new Yod or cycle.

The 2nd HEH (fem) generates new YOD (masc)

Finally, add together the numbers of Y H V H in the reading for an overview. Consider Y H V H as sides of a pyramid: the fifth card is the apex. It is represented by the three-pronged 21st Hebrew letter SHIN. As YHVH is Jahweh, YHShVH is Yeshua, who liberates. So the fifth and central card, representing the SHIN, may be seen as a liberating overview, with altitude or perspective: the Hermetic relationship of Above and Below.

Here, Key12 the Hanging Man (it was reversed) walks contra the way of the world; also suggesting a sacrifice. He is flanked by 20/Ascension and 14/Temperance.

The Hanged Man is Yod for the Lovers, the Tower and Tarot Key 8 the woman with the lion. 12+6+16+8 = 42 = 6; the Lovers at the apex, as in the Heh card ‘below’. The Tower cracked open. The woman contains the red lion. The lovers – twice 6 are 12 – are equilibrium. The Hanging Man on the inner plane equilibrates the pendulum at rest – the birth into earth: seed drops.

The Tower mirrors the Hanging Man. Come to meet or unify the male and female consciousness tumbling out. The Tower is a well. I wondered deeply at the mirroring. The Tower in alchemy is a Grail vessel which periodically cracks shell. Nothing in nature remains static. The Hanging Man is a lake. The Tower is a lightning flash.

I just noticed the ‘contact pattern’ of numbers in this reflection: 6 12, 16 8. For me, this kind of pattern indicates that a Master’s eye is near; for what small wit of mine could casually bestow the spontaneous harmonic? The oracle is a relationship with the inner plane and its wisdom.

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Regarding yesterday’s encounter, shown to me twice in different places where I just ‘happened to be’ – it was a Sky-hawk’s view: as the heavenly eye and the earthly detailed eye of Horus homed into the Bull & Bush (a pub near Golders Green). I was given a view behind the stage into private rooms.

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Journal 26 June 2018 THE WHITE EAGLE IN ALCHEMY

Deeply tired. Physically … It is very hot weather, I got back from Nether Stowey yesterday and went in the evening to the Castle to sample the “women’s bouldering” – no vitality at first, on my own! bored and dull. But when I met up with shapely Christine and large dreadlocked Jamaican Marie I discovered what a huge difference it makes to be encouraged and to take turns at a pitch and watch each other. I discovered that I climb quite well, considering I’ve only done it for a month, and can attempt what the other two do, who’ve done it for two years. I did a V1 Yellow route – very pleased. When people get together it is called a Session, and the venue is cooperatively social. Next time, take my harness and do a top-rope climb with the automatic belay. Just as it was getting a bit routine, I am through the roof again. With leg work, do “small steps”. This positions and balances much better for long reaches. My new friends try going up slabs with just their feet – palms on slab, no hold. I tried it too. Getting a little more confident with those nasty moments which rely on vertical balance, perched on the wall. Also discovered I recover quickly from each effort and am ready to go again. But this morning … EXHAUSTED! Maybe the heat. Sweating.

Tired – let go into it – lovely walk at the weekend up into Quantock woods with my mother, her slow fragile pace being my opportunity to contact with the ground and flow – weightless sole of feet and hips: sweet leafy tunnels, dark earth and great populations of young dancing oaks shot through with light. What will I do, what will I feel when she is gone? How vivid and intense is her descending imprint of life. Here today but in a few years, gone! Her imprint, her sticks, her soul pattern are a flower through the wooded hills.

I love this one. Lay it out again. The Hanging Man is the Waters and therefore the Well – and dangles head down into the erupting lightning-struck tower. What appears violent in one plane is peaceful in another. At apex the pendulum rests at midpoint pivoting. In the pendulum’s returning arcs to each side are the Archangels Mikael and Gabriel!

The Lovers – twice – are Rafael.The Tower represents Archangel Uriel’s flash of lightning. The Great Four Guardians are in the belly of the woman with her red lion!

Three great Scarlet Keys – 20, the mother-fire letter SHIN (Archangel Gabriel with trumpet), the red lion in 8, and red fiery Mars,16.

The beautiful Tempering element or balancing – Keys 14, 12 and 6.

The simple way with the oracle is to visualise and contemplate its image or reflection. The oracle does the rest. Visualise the pictures and their integrity and speech – the power. Do I begin life this way? The tower is a figure of speech – where God opens mouth. In the same way, the woman guides the red lion’s mouth to sing, rather than roar. The Lovers in their nude grace give space for each other beneath Rafael’s wings, with Mount Binah in the landscape between them. The Binah landscape is the Understanding. The Understanding is Ramesh Balsekar’s beautiful unadorned word for the teaching.

What a lot of wings! Three pairs upraise that invincible perfumed power of the angels. The angels bear vast power. Nothing can oppose them, for they are the Law. They carry out the Law and beneath the shelter and shadow of their Wings are my rod and staff. Gabriel’s wings are raised up: Mikael’s and Rafael’s are at rest.

My first insight with this on Saturday 23 June was to meet all things with deep surrendering equanimity. Eruptions and fireballs in the earth plane, local and at large, are within the Provenance of these Higher Beings. Who can predict what They see at a glance? I feel the hawk’s eye. I love the way the Hanging Man peacefully drops down into the drama of the Tower erupting. The Hanging Man is the dew of heaven. Regarded the wrong way round, he gets a bad press. The Hanging Man is the power of offering no resistance to the event great or small – the event is blessed by the angels.

On the Tree of Life diagram is shown Mars-sulphur glyph and Hanging Man as the Venusian descent of Mezla, dew of heaven.

On the horizontal beam of JHVH cross – the two HEHs, keys 6 and 8 – note the same green landscape with its distant violet mountain. That mountain, a simple cone in the drawing, signifies all mountain ranges and their inspiration; Binah is the alchemical salt or crystal of Saturn. Saturn governs the maturity of any unfolding process. The exploding Tower is the crack in earth I’ve been registering recently. There are events elsewhere in which this crack is catastrophic.

I love to be here the gentle power of the woman with the Lion – her hands in the corners of his smile, the red rose garland binding woman and beast in a figure of eight, her long white robe, the flowers in her hair, the golden sky.

It is a version of the 34th Gene Key, the ancient Beauty of the Beast. See, her spine straightens up as she tunes his vocal cords. The serpent power of his tail is electro-magnetic.

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The pair of lovers in Key 16 are hurled from the cracking tower into manifestation – seeds burst from splitting pod – but in Key 6 their marriage is made in heaven. The mental plane with the Archangel through which they see each other and speak, is veiled by cloud from the generative organs of Earth. Nature’s instinctive work is attuned to the power of Consciousness. The Buddhic and Causality regions through the mental, astral and physical planes are depicted here. Packages of history are layered as in a jamjar containing salts, gravels and silts. From the Golden Source shines Rafael’s countenance and hands. There are the fruits and flames of Eden; there emerge just above the cloudy veil the Lovers’ faces; their reciprocal intelligence allows their hands to join with the Holy One. Trusting their body they stand by their Trees.

In Temperance the design is the same, but the Lovers are in the animal kingdom, lion and eagle; and Archangel Mikael cooks and cools them (see the BOTA version). Fire flows; and water burns. There’s the distant Mountain also! – crowned with the Solar genius.

In Judgement 20, the Lovers co-created their Child who ascends with them to Gabriel’s intimate trumpet call. Although this is a Fire Key, it is filled with icebergs and floating stone. It is primordial before, through and transcending biological Life. The Lovers in the centre of the reading are fertile. The Mountain in the distance is the Child growing within them. With the repeated mountain symbol, the dew of YOD and VAV falls into the volcanic well.

Life blossoms in the universality of death, the downward flowing brook.

Snake, water, stone …

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And now bring in my other main area of study, the 64 Gene Keys transmission (Richard Rudd and friends):

Which I Ching hexagram does the Hanging Man over lightning-struck Tower suggest to me? In the Hebrew alphabet the Hanging Man is MIM the Waters, and the Tower is PEH the spitting fire of Mars and speech.

Looking up the I Ching trigrams of water over fire, I find their union is the 3rd hexagram: Difficulty at the Beginning. In the Gene Keys transmission which is based on the I Ching, the 3rd hexagram/Gene Key is called ‘Through the Eyes of a Child‘. The Shadow, Gift and Siddhi archetypes of this Gene Key are Chaos, Innovation, Innocence.

The innovative Gift within the 3rd Shadow is called “The end of island mentality”! In this gene key is coded the fact that the cell’s innovative and relational genius lies not in the nucleus but within the interactive cellular membrane between each cell. On this principle may be based the coming social revolution of Solar fusion energy. Why? because the Solar photon which moves and is kindled in all directions, is coming and will come into its own. Is not the Tower itself, seemingly destructive but seminally creative, a solar photon of this kind?

The eyes of the Hanging Man Child are wide open and filled with light, diving through and into the membrane which we used to believe kept us separate. He wears blue tunic and red hose – the woman and man fall out of the dark tower headfirst – and golden shoes. He unifies their torment of separateness. As one even with the refugee catastrophe all over the world is this one’s peace. Blessed are the fractured for they shall be made whole.

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..I just turned to some pages from Paul Foster Case’s “The Great Work” and found the chapter on “Digestion”. It is the fifth stage and it is Hebrew letter TETh, Key 8 – Tarot key 9, of Strength, woman with lion. I will abridge it, for the original material is copyrighted to the Builders of the Adytum. In brief, PFC says,

“Chemically, the digestive process exposes a foodstuff to the action of a liquid with the aid of heat (the elements of fire and water), to extract its subtle constituents.

“The cosmic mental energy is ‘watery’ because it flows in streams as current, forms vibrational waves, is tidal and reflects like a mirror..

“Alchemical fire is the electric vital force taking form as solar radiance and heat, the animating principle of all creatures. The fiery action breaks down and consumes the forms through which it came to conscious life.

“On the Tree of Life the Hebrew letter TETh joins Hesed (water of life), to Gevurah (fire of life). The way in which these two occult elements combine is called ‘the intelligence of the secret of works’.

“Hesed is … centred in the solar plexus or Jupiter centre. Gevurah the sphere of Mars … works through the Mars centre. Digestion as understood in alchemy, blends the forces of the Jupiter and Mars chakras … …(with the action of the Sun and Virgo).

“As TETh means “serpent”, the Secret Intelligence concerns the raising of the serpent power. An alchemist transforms it into the WHITE EAGLE. As the eagle is of Zeus or Jupiter, alchemical work essentially transmutes Mars (the Tower, key 16) into Jupiter (the Wheel, Key 10).

“What else is this, but the transformation of the destructive force which overthrows form into that perfect comprehension of Reality which fulfils our real desires?”

Abridged from the writing of Paul Foster Case

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The Hawk, the far-seeing Horus Child is the White Eagle.

The Mars and Jupiter centres together constitute the solar plexus intelligence in the Gene Keys transmission and teachings. Add to it, Saturn the root chakra. And stand firm, and glide and climb and undulate and blossom!

The Hanging Man’s facial expression is let down into all unquiet scenes.

Parts Two and Three to follow

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

In Persia there is an ancient Zoroastrian rite – outlawed by the current regime – to jump over the fire with the early days of spring. Letting go our worries into the flames, the firebird phoenix rises from the ashes. We enjoy the feast with neighbours and family. In Iran and Kurdistan and all over the world the elder secret fire is stirred.

volcano

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Before the fire party, I took my camera over Hampstead Heath. The fire is in the wood: the life is in the waters.

Spring spikes sky pond

Oak flows

pondering

The White Bull

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triad fire nests

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THE PAINTBOX: all of this has colour and swishes of the loaded brush. The fire mystery is within my dryadic photo odyssey through the heath and Sandy-heath and ponds: the sexual flow and texture of oak and spiky root and arboreal nakedness and light: the trees piercing the pond are shivered by ripples of a passing pair of ducks. The Rite of spring!

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Loaded brush stroke

A Song by ‘Argent’ (1970s):

We will light a giant burning fire tonightWe will build it and dance in the smokeEvery branch we’ll tie somebody’s worry to itWe will burn it and dance in the smoke

I recall it was too tallTo see the flames grow highBut on tiptoeThe flames would growAnd burn into the sky!

WHAT IS CULTURE? … something about Siva and the Rishis’ wives in elder India.

The Rishis’ ashram had become a dry old stick of the intellect. Vagrant lord Siva came as Agni (sacred fire deity) out of the forest and impregnated the Rishis’ wives through their hair follicles, as they warmed themselves around the blaze. I have always loved this story.

Last night I saw fire, ashes, crackling sticks of the nest, and the flaming, dancing Bird. In the fire I knew there is Zoroaster … the edge, the archetypal cleavage of the darkness and the light: Azda, Ahriman – vaguely recalled concepts which I drew thirty years ago.

Sunflower & Ahriman, 1986 – the dark and the light support each other

The reality however, of the flame and the love and the family and the dancing, jumping and singing around and in the fire … and later, the soft and ancient glow of knowledge through my body … is ORIGINAL, and cancels book-learning like the sea in my face: Gnosis.

Fire is fire, the heart and hearth and art of the fire: Thou ART i AM.

It is like the fire in Plato’s cave … the inner fire, and its passage to the Sun outside, as night falls on apple blossom in the garden.

I saw that the old and worshiped treasures of human culture, which developed into religions and spiritual paths and occult Mysteries are this thing that families do around the fire, around the heart, long before anything got written about it. Then the children grow inside the women. There is no need for Schools. Here, the consecrate seed begins.

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Gallery – click on image

Warrior’s dance, 1986

Gwynedd Szegedy Szuts: watercolour sketch 2016

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

“What will you do God, when I die?” (Rilke). What will I do when my father dies?

I am reading the Castaneda books again. The Teachings (which terrified me in my psychedelic twenties) leaves me unmoved now, but the next book, A Separate Reality, awakens my seeing. This idea and its practice is seminal to my vital life. It gets submerged and reappears as a reality and re-membering.

What is seeing? It is when my heart-path sees through appearances and chimes the interconnecting filaments which bond every unique thing like gossamer. We humans are not those mere shapes in which we depress and die: we are egg-auras of the omnipresent flowing filaments, filled with awe and pulsation. When I stop looking, and see, I let go of depressing worries about my father’s discomfort as he grows much weaker, and my mother’s fret, and instead I focus the current. To see is to receive.

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The current has within it the wisdom of time, place and providence. It gives me freedom, space and sanity. It touches the other with that strength of purpose and surrender. For me, everything boils down into the practice of seeing. When this way is open, the silly mind is silent. Seeing floods the mental engine and stops its opera. Real mind then works efficiently: connections and arrangements are made; the right level of care falls into place; patience knits.

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Paths of Awakening

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In fact the trap-door opens. In the Tree of Life, the Daat catflap opens, so the transpersonal informs and revitalises the personal vehicle Yesod.

I must keep this way open for when I too am crumbling and dying and losing the plot. When it is closed up, I am tired, querulous and crazy. When it is open, I am my real self and sane. The worst thing for we humans about old age and dying, is the conditioned fears, papers and complicated houses, which crowd in and clog us up.

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A warrior learns throughout life to dance to his or her dying: crows (turned silver) fly along the sunset – the image from the Teachings of Don Juan is very beautiful. The only thing I can do for my dying parent is to be mindful of my warrior-dance and his: to see. Over his house each morning at dawn flies a carol of starlings almost in murmuration. (See this link for videos).

A family carries the same principle as a murmuration. (A spiritual or martial movement does the same.) A murmuration is a flock of birds forming fish-like patterns in the sky. The murmuration carries single birds in a singing cloud, constantly changing its shape, and greater by far, than the sum of all its fluttering hearts.

It is the same with the cells and all the moving parts of the body: the individual element serves the greater intelligence, in the natural state. Joy is a dissolution of conflict, as waves become the sea. Through conflict, we grow. It arises, settles, changes and vanishes.

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To see is the opposite of the life-habit way of looking-at. Perhaps animals see, and know therefore far more than we do. Seeing includes the raw fear built into nature and earth’s tension and predators; but the beatitude around the seeing is radically different from our angular human bungalows.

Plants and stones see. So do stars and angels and demons. So does our planet Earth Gaia, with the sores in her skin: a different order of time. I then see the days and months and people coming and going in my father’s house and his struggle with failing heart aged 93, as an eye-blink, a preparation for the birth which is his death and planting: it awaits the astrological cadence. It could be weeks or several months, or more. It could be tomorrow. With this view I relax with the rugged rocks of necessity, and can be more present and helpful.

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Seeing as a practice, is a compassionate, tender objectivity. The seer engages more intimately with the condition than she could when she dramatised about it. To see is a conscious decision to switch off the drama.

My daily drama which blankets life is death.

Approaching the reality of physical death is Life.

I am getting tentative hold of this concept. I live mostly in the walking dead – thus the conflict of nations and beliefs. As physical death draws near, Life becomes exposed – essence of life and pain: truth. An essence of life is taken through the birth canal of Daat in the Tree of Life, as the physical heart lets go of its grip, its rhythm with the viscera … and then it flies. Rekindling my sense of this, may assist my father by resonance, as we are close, we are both Capricorn-Cancer, the coastal path, the human song.

The sea beats against the cliff and the land falls into the sea. When he read the Castaneda books he said the Sonora desert is a conscious power-point, like the ions along a rocky coastal path, where waves meet the rolling fields. We live and die into this eternal sound of one hand clapping. Time passes.

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Contemplatively, I hold him in my arms with this. I renew his philosophy and his quest: his name and form fade into the landscape, into the music and the birds. His body farmed the land for a teeming moment, for almost a century! Thank you for the green fields we knew and grew in, and all their names!

Contemplatively I scan the ocean ahead – what will it be like after he dies?

How can I know? I feel in touch.

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

Let us form a vessel …? In the Gayatri Mantra, the brilliance of enlightenment is perceived in the air between the trouble and grief and terrors and tension and pollution in the world. Give room: the pain of life as it is. Do not inflate pain into personal woe, which shuts the room and makes it noisy.

Through the coming, going and the balance of the essential naturewhich illumines existence, is the adorable One.May all perceive through subtle intellectthe brilliance of enlightenment.

Translation by Deva Premal

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Near my mother’s house, there is a steep hillside into a bouncy valley. A direct perception opened: walk down into my face – a Quantock bowl of fields and villages … or as in the drawing above, the Welsh coast near Strumble head. Inclusively, my hips and feet flow soft with gravity, the descent, receiving the earth, the dance, the touching.

Grief stings my heart – my mother’s sister died at 93, and the dog in London is gone – the field broke apart to enter the valley I am. I am free. The fields, the undulant hills and trees are my facial features; I have no other. The steep lane and wide encircling landscape arouse my philosophy, my space of being … beyond speech.

red campion

I discover an identical resonance in the Gayatri mantra, the Lords Prayer, the Hail Mary and the Kabbalah Invocation: “let thy will be done.” Particle-waves of enlightenment are latent within the body of each circumstance. Within every challenge of love, grief, boundaries, fair conduct, discernment and “I will”, the opening catches me inescapably. My father called the hardy pink campion flowers “bridget in her bravery“. Bravery is the bride.

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seabird and boat, near isle of Rhum

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ConnectI finished and published the Minona post in my other blog (17 September). The Minona and Beethoven drawing which I had such trouble with, is powerful. The soft blaze of grief is in her eyes.

Beethoven and Minona

I went on reading my 2014 journal on the bus home from the Quantock hills, enjoying it; I raised my spirits by softly singing the Gayatri mantra for a while. There is a lot in my journal last year, about the evolution of eros in our world. Adam-Eve had thoughts which grew into trees, animals and life – did I not walk down the Quantock hills into these, my soul body, my absence into Real-I?

Make this intention ongoing through the “unknown cognition” towards a community of grace. Let go into the opening field space. The blue Maurice Nicoll Commentary books contain the essence of Self enquiry, Ramana’s teaching, for post war western survivors in the Work.

So what to write now, to connect? Wait and listen and it shall come. Be willing for the Master to write. Remain quiet. I woke depressed and confused this morning, semi-dreaming about getting stuck on sheer pillars of rotten rock and cheating my way down to the ground. The false mind sets cruel tasks. But earlier I dreamt I was in a car with a man from the past – and our legs touched, and the feelings blossomed like they used to, brooking no deflection. I want to move on, yet the way in this lifetime powerfully embraces each other.

To connect, I wait and listen to Nicoll’s Commentaries: “You cannot reach Real I through personality, only through development of Essence…. Essence however, cannot grow unless personality is formed around it by life on this planet … A man must learn from life, become a good Householder …” In other words, God does not create us perfect, we are active, responsible participants in the Re-membering.

“You may ask why, if we were created perfect, at a level higher than Earth, it is necessary to be made to descend at all. The answer is that a being created perfect has contributed nothing to its own development. It would be easily tempted. Man by descent and ascent thus becomes stronger ‘than the angels’, as it is said somewhere.”

I made this balsa boat for my grandmother in about 1963. She called it “Annapurna in cumulus clouds”

My sense of descending into the Landscape Bowl of mud and villages and steep fields and curving lanes as my vital parameter, awakens. When it is separate, or just a background, I am shut away from empathy or taste of Life.

Crossing the road at Hammersmith bus station – all the moving flock are “I”. Their mystery moves through mine and is my being; I create them as God does, or a child in the garden of being. Their never ending history is ready made. The instant they are created, their infinite past thread springs to life, just like that. This perception has no room for war, and outmodes religious conflict. When such a thought form is focused and strong, it has power to connect and to generate life and love.

Harbour 1987 – my ship of the soul

I am reading The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende, which suggests that creative imagination in the human psyche strikes eternity fore and aft as it becomes fully conscious; there is no beginning or end to being. But great gaps of Nothing encroach, where the faculty is abused, distorted and destroyed.

The great evolutionary change occurring in humanity may be the shocking revolution that there is no heavenly thing or ruler which is God.

Instead, the dimension of God is kindled with the tinder-sticks of compassion laid together. The moment God is kindled through compassionate empathy and acceptance of each other, the One Reality, unendingly past and future, is omnipresent. We can no longer devolve our responsibility onto an almighty figurehead: that was the codependent dream of infants. Opportunities to ‘do the beautiful’ as the Sufis say, are given to our inter-dependent re-cognition. We see what was and is done by religious wars to destroy life and origins, and in the media jungle to erase human worth: the gaps of Nothing in the never ending story. There is an enormous resistance to awakening; the ground resists the upward spring; the long dark shadows cast by the rising sun, are Karmic samsara enclosures, which slowly fade.

Return to the flowing nature of God: the tetrahedral cycle of J H V H through human eternity: the vital solar spark of SAVITUR in the Gayatri, through the subtle intelligence.

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Nicoll asks, What is Understanding? “If Intellectual and Emotional Centres cooperate, then understanding begins. Does it mean a seeing together of many things from many points of view, and so quite distinct from one-sidedness?”

“We make aim in the Work, but do we understand our aim?”
To understand is essentially, to connect, with all our parts.

Boats at Alet, Brittany, 1985

Boats on storm tossed marina, 1985

To be present when I am in pain or sorrowing, is to earth it. Then pain and sorrow are not trapped in thoughts or moral scholars, they exist freely. There is no argument or resistance to existence. “If you don’t fight with life, life takes you up, puts you on its shoulder …” Pain and joy and the light of foot belong here equally and seamlessly, passing into one another. If I grasp the root stem of my grief, it becomes still and holds the ship like a mast. Upon the larger part of my being, the words to tell are a scrap, a wet hanky only. Moments of inner connection are searing, silent and deeply satisfying. The understanding is not verbal. Understanding is presence … stand under the water falling.

tidal wave 1986

Harbour 1986 – these two paintings were on the same day.

Moments of the inner connection connect with this level of being, throughout the humanosphere. My inner connecting connects socially, and beyond. In this strata I may pick up the Messages of the Great Ones. We are a fleet of living masts – and masts are aerials, antennae, antakharana – the One mast, of infinite variety.

Signal the Companions of the Light.

Ships in my mother’s house

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

Nearly two months ago, I dreamed about “the blue books of Ramana”. In fact they looked exactly like the collection of Maurice Nicoll’s Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff. These four volumes – from Alan Jacobs’s library – have sat on my highest bookshelf for many years.

“I dreamed I was late for an event and toiling or dashing up and down a long street to collect items which others expected. Among the parade of shops on the right, a sign stood out, advertising an unknown book about Ramana Maharshi. I forgot the title, but it was his soul in the teaching. The sign remained consistently visible. At last I investigated, walked up that side of the street, looked for its doorway among the restaurants, hairdressers and supermarkets – and found: an Indian goods emporium. My way to the counter was blocked by a herd of huge brown smelly buffaloes. I turned away, dispirited, but then the herd miraculously cleared. I made enquiry for the book, and was directed to another region of the vast shop. Upstairs where the books were. a friendly Indian woman assistant said Yes she knows the book, and got it for me. It was a set of slim old volumes with worn cloth binding, a beautiful natural dark blue, like Jim Ede’s Moroccan jacket, faded and buffed at the corners. There were three larger ones and one smaller one. I looked among the pages and wanted it very much. It contained everything in the “Talks” and other recorded conversations, and more …. what a collector’s item!

“The woman smiled and said this is not cheap. It is a first edition. How much? I asked. She replied, £700. So I couldn’t possibly buy it. She smiled. Then I woke up.

“I don’t need to buy it, for I have it in my soul – the beautiful blue covers of this teaching, the feel of the close white written pages inside: the liberation. It is enough to hold it for a moment in my hands, and remember. Maybe the significance of the 700 will emerge? This contact un-crowds my life. I touch base.”

Ramana coming down off the hill

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Some difficult weeks passed; then at last I reached up for Volume Four of Nicoll’s Commentaries – which wear the same jacket. I rediscover inside, in the practical way it works for me, the soul of Ramana Maharshi’s Self-enquiry. In the last decade of Ramana’s life, Dr Nicoll was teaching and exploring the Work in his kindly way it seems by morphic resonance, in England during and after the war.

Dr Maurice Nicoll

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14 September 2015

Nicoll – “The Work teaches: ‘Observe yourselves uncritically and become more and more conscious of what is in your being and so become more and more objective to yourselves.’

“As you know already, this will gradually dissolve the Imaginary I, the False I, the False Personality that one has hitherto taken as oneself, and has nothing to do with the true centre of gravity of yourself called Real I.’”

He then goes on to discuss Recurrence. Ouspensky worked out a dimensional cosmology whereby we recur until the change begins to be made at birth. I don’t go fully with this, but I do observe my recurring Difficult Corner where I have failed and where I identify with what life throws at me – it is the identical misery and discomfort each time. So for me Recurrence is a psychological reality but not a literal one.

On the other hand, Nicoll feels the recurrence of Self remembering makes itSelf stronger also. There is also the idea of Conscious Man reincarnating in an earlier part of historical time, where he can prevent things from going as they did. There is a plethora of parallel universes or possibles.

Violet Crystal 1988 – particle interaction in Tao of Physics

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In quantum physics a particle travels back and forth in time as space, through interaction. The entanglement of future probables and re-shaping is an open mystery beyond the mental reach. The standard intellect collapses here. So people say it is impossible to reincarnate in the past, because of the advancing doctrine of time; but I am not sure. There is a power of choice. The choice is powerfully identified with the genetic flow and with cause and effect; but that same power might also antedate the causality. This power clasps the self or role I think I am. The role rides off with me. The historical possibilities are limitless, but I am voluntarily confined to the one familiar.

The full form of Self remembering is “the self that knows its own nothingness.”

Reacting to life is not doing or choosing. Reacting to life is not proactive but passively being driven into the difficult corner. “To change the action of life on you by inner work on impressions, is certainly to begin to do … begin with smallest daily things. … If we say that one meaning of Self remembering is to remember the Work at the moment when life makes you negative, here is a practical idea of Self remembering. The Work is brought into intimate personal existence …”

In the next Commentary, he says Time is a dimension of psychological distance and the ways of Self remembering must be held together, else they get lost. He says Truth is silver (like the parable woman looking for a piece of silver in her house) – it is also a hatching egg: the contact must be sustained by nesting.

The Work and the way it thinks, is a lift, an elevator towards Those that stand in the light. “By means of our own thoughts, which are those of sleeping people imagining they are fully conscious, we cannot reach the thoughts that belong to people who stand in the light of Self remembering, and view the meaning of existence from that level… which weakens the mechanical power of sensual life/thinking and its apparent reality…. Now, if incoming life/impressions falls onto the Work, its energy is transformed; the first Conscious Shock.”

(The Enneagram was a significant part of Gurdjieff’s teaching – an octave of musical intervals wherein the Work’s 1st and 2nd Conscious Shocks occur at the semi-tones. At the level of 2nd Conscious Shock, negative emotions transform into positive – as I understand it.)

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The Work has to be the skin on which life’s impressions fall. If they fall on me personally, I react with mechanical skinless stress, and recur. There has to be this something to buffer and transpose and filter the events. In fact my journal is this filter. It records, but it attempts to filter the data to allow passage to those who stand in the light. The data become that passage. It is like being in a wood of dark trees, and first the stems turn grey, then the same stems are illumined as light. And then there is a threshold of not knowing but being: my small self gives up trying to solve issues, but touches wood.

Touch wood!

That is neat.

The Work is the process of transforming the negative effects of life. Touching the wood is in the present, the Now.

In the Babel or Confusion of Tongues, none of us understand each other. The Conscious circle of humanity perhaps speak in tongues, like the Pentecost. When I am not in Babel, I seem to hear another person’s being. I seem to hear many tongues of being, like a river, simply as being; and respectful of their private flow. My engine stops. Every morning, my writing’s objective is to find this point again: non-interference.

“Those in the Third Consciousness get help from higher Centres – another way of understanding their apparently insoluble life-problems. … If life could be solved, then this Work could not exist. This Work is to make life possible in the sense that you cannot understand life save in terms of something else. This something else is the Work. Therefore if the Work could fall on the Work, internally we would awake.”

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Observe yourselves uncritically and become more and more conscious of what is in your being and so become more and more objective to yourselves.’

This becomes phenomenological. Instead of my assumptive and headstrong bias, lay out the sensory I’s and attachments on the table; observe uncritically and be aware.

I find this hard, because anxious I obscures all the other I’s. Also, ghastly self image of being a dog with a grimacing gyrating grinning human waving the collar over my head and trying to put it on. Ah-ha. So to observe an I is to be it from inside! Empathy. Any others?

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What about wading into the sea? being biffed by small salt waves.

The king is in his counting house, counting up his money, the queen is in her parlour, eating bread and honey. Play patience with the game of life.

In general today, do not isolate the I’s, enter and engage with them consciously. Let the Work act on them. Do not analyse but observe – it is extremely difficult to observe the causes of negative emotions. Ah-ha, here is one: the fallout of Romance. My romantic-I enters and invests heart and soul into proud and happy love affairs. Sooner or later that quality begins to shift, to unseat and to change – to doubt itself; to discover it was all a projection or has become one. What about the warmth, love and happiness that drives and vitalises the projection? Understand that no state is sustained. Everything arises, settles, changes and vanishes. I have been lucky to have love affairs of different kinds in the Work. Nothing is permanent.

So there are two – dog in collar and Romance-love. These are passionate, enthusiastic states of being, and I just had a hefty dose of the dog in collar. How they run together and blur!

With Maya, a friend’s dog whom I loved and have had to say goodbye to – how I cried! – and am just starting to recover. This and the other photos of Mask and Mantree were taken by an artist, Tony Wigg in the woods, for a spontaneous ‘happening’ – I stepped into the mask and veil.

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There are the Intellectual, Emotional and Moving centres. It is helpful to recall these, ‘phenomenologically’.

There is the I who doesn’t want to upset or offend. The I who finds it complicated to speak. The bossy controlling I, who knows best. The cliff-path exploring I. The child I. The creative art I. The perfectionist I. The liar I. The lazy idle I. These for starters. They all pretend Real-I, but they are not. Real-I offers their inclusive sub stratum. And (added later) – the ASHAMED I, which lost my way home. And FEAR-I. And GUILT-i.

There is an expression: wasting force. Locate and do not waste force.

In the Emotional centre, observe the taste of the emotions, and whether I am identified or not. In the Moving centre, observe physical and subliminal tensions, and how I hurry or move. In the Intellectual centre, be aware of the kinds of thought going on, and whether I am hooked.

(Gurdjieff Movements: Photos by Amir Kaufmann)

Intellectual, Emotional and Moving centres move at different rates. You can’t apply Intellectual centre to Moving centre, because Moving centre is much slower than Intellectual centre’s rapid transactions. But you can use Moving centre with the breath and awareness of hips, soles of feet and so on … to slow down and integrate the other two into a vehicle that stays in gear. Being aware of the three centres is helpful – to discriminate them.

Gurdjieff demonstrated that people have habits in their three centres, which are very difficult to change. It is difficult to change habits in intellectual and emotional centres; it is easier to change them in the moving centre. So he taught the movements and the dances which interrupt the habit. Work on intellectual and emotional centres must accompany and integrate work on moving centre. Many years ago I practiced slowing my negative thoughts down to the physical rate of speech. Mind stuff is mercurially self-addictive like lightning. It was amazing how quickly it got bored and the drama vanished, when I spelled out the ‘hot thought’ slowly! I couldn’t complete the sentence.

One of the many disciplines for moving centre, is hatha yoga.

Another exercise: for five minutes, put consciousness into every part of body, beginning with face muscles, to prevent being identified with a stress or wasted force. “Putting consciousness into the muscle tension is both internal and external attention. Try putting it in your right thumb – then in your left.”

Now, a question is asked (p.1253) – “What is this Work about? Why do we do it?”

The Work, the Great Work, and any form of esoteric study or spiritual practice, is done because I am not alone in the world, I live and interact with others. I am thrown in the world systemically among the moving plates of the sea, and how I interact and externally consider others, makes a difference. I cannot live with myself without it – without repeatedly trying to be aware in and as the world.

I seem to embark on long follies or illusions in my relationships and romances. Their learning curve is how I am made. I try to avoid it, and cannot – I throw myself into the golden key. In each, there is good will, love and rich data, as well as shadow. There is recurrence: there may one day come an opening through recurrence.

dancer – colliding tide at shingle street, suffolk

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

AVE. Some strong spiritual leaders of humanity “clothe their higher bodies with physical matter, by stepping down the vibratory rate of their personal vehicles. The greater number are men and women who came into earth-life in the usual way” through the birth canal.

(Quotation from Paul Foster Case)

Every one of us has the unfolding, dormant or active potential of master of humanity: magister. Ramana and other sages relate to this, in each soul they see. The “grade” is omnipresent, for it is our true Self, and it is mostly unnoticed.

It is a remarkable thing to creep into the embodied arena through that tiny little door and fall into the storms, milk and wiped slate of babyhood. Our deepest privacy is what we no longer remember, because our memory’s data base rests on learning to read. Before literacy, there is usually an awakening contact with the tribe of past lives, their fruition in this one – the magic of childhood.

The magi move with ease, when their bodies have grown up through the dramas of puberty and infancy. Hold this impression: the magister in me through a string of births: the oak inside the acorn: the presence of the magister in every time and place, is a lode star: I keep returning to talk about it.

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My writing in the mornings consists of: spiritual contact, study and psychology – the daily application – for instance, tales of the garden at Alum Way reflect for me in their textures and patterns of leaves, the contact of the deep. They do, because there is love going on there – enough to much amuse the magister: enough to ground the settlement: enough to reflect the law. Human love is a servant to the transpersonal. Instinctively, it makes me work hard and develops my dedication.

Yesterday I sowed the first grass seeds along the edge of the garden where the rubbish dump used to be – I knelt and stroked them into the earth. The man came along at that moment and teased. In the evening we watch Grand Designs, following persons who build their dream mansions, and all the problems of construction, relationship and planning – a roof which turns out to be too high, etc. And look at me! My Grand Design in reverse, removed a mountain, and I end up not high on the roof but hands and knees on the ground, like this – smile.

Ramana used to say, when you dig a well, or realise your Self, all you do is remove what isn’t there. All that stuff blocking it is space. For much of my life I fantasised Capricornly about building or creating some big thing bare handedly – it turns out to be this space, and it gives me confidence at various levels. Only with our hands touching earth do we realise the heavenly motions.

Yesterday I also painted both gates green – a brighter park-bench Venus green which the man bought and finds more cheerful: his instinctive signal to the Zombies (neighbours) – my green is bigger than yours – and re-organised the back “subconscious” wild garden, moved the tip-rubbish to the other side of its entrance, sorted out the woodpile/long lovely privet poles for fencing, and raked up the man’s grass trimmings. The Zombies were busy trimming the elderflower tree by the street – they have plans for their little front garden; with their fear of the man, they use their back garden less. I do not have the social skill to speak to them at present, but I enjoyed the feeling of them working near me: the Meerkat – who has turned blonde – sweeping up leaf-litter by the bins. The man’s way with the Zombies is now quite sensible – keep distance: aloof courtesy.

Now yesterday – my insights from the garden clearance begin to dew – I jotted that it doesn’t matter to be wrong or mistaken. The magi too are constantly adjusting focus: like one who draws. The fixed fear of making mistakes is egotistic.

I saw when dozing the other day, an image of the Victoria Falls – there are pictures of them in Prof Cox’s universe book, a magical place of rainbows falling (of course) on himself – the fast moving flood tosses turbulent white. On the brink, bushy islands or trees part the vast spill. I saw this too from a distance, like teeth and gaps, or silhouettes, and imagined myself caught on one of those tree-clumps between the thundering waters: identifying. I flit like a butterfly by an abyss – cliffs of fall. The subconscious distils to me the image. The dark places where the trees cling to rock, along the wide white bite of the falls, shocked and awoke me. Jung says “unconscious” material floats to the surface and shocks the dreamer.

Similarly: the patches of the finite – vibrant bodylife, and its moods and dreaming cityscapes – are pasted on the infinite. They – the silhouettes – are on a plane merged with the grey Infinite, yet distinct, like threads of oil on water. For some reason the silhouette being not tilted but resting in the plane, pleases me.

I swim in your silhouette, your shadow on the grass – a little pool. Circles – pennies – of the soul that can lie a little overlapping one another as vesica pisces without invasion, are a tender discovery. I don’t think it is possible in a relationship’s early stages to venture this, because too many karmic defences and compulsions are being processed. In the early stages there is infatuation and quite a lot of psychic rape.

Lay the coins – the shadow discs of the soul – together, move their edges over one another, then back. The fish where circles overlap, is a fluid oval, and from it the Angel or the Child rises. Relationship – as spiritual practice – is a field where the shadow discs quiver together like leaves in the breeze. It is whimsical or it is conscious. The clean parting is as important as the merging. That is why the Lovers’ hebrew emblem is ZAIN the sword whose tip parts the ways. It applies to partnership and to the binary relationship within my self.

(“And” is VAV, the Hierophant. This is because the hebrew letter VAV means a hook or nail – something that joins things together or bridges souls – and even signifies the grammatical conjunction “and”.)

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The shadow discs lie in the field, deep blue with night. One may look into the other, and empathise, withdraw, empathise. To speak is not necessary. They throb.

Yesterday was not really optimum for planting grass, with the Moon in last quarter. However my incentive to carry through, was strong – the Moon in Capricorn, and Mercury, Venus and Mars in Taurus. 21 May, my daughter’s birthday, is also for me, a moment of the Magi; they reveal their face. The gardens – all earth, with some timber piles, a few new shrubs and garlanded with trees – are a beauteous space in readiness, an invitation. This week is also the man and my 5th anniversary. There is a curious and welcome spiritual relaxation – take it or leave it – with things. Removal of anxiety is truth.

But see: keep clearing: pause in the inward turned writing, which is on a daily base repetitive, and be silent; hear and see. The world was rumoured to come to an end, yesterday.

The gardens are a lens, responding also to my meetings with Jung and Master R at a plain round table in a secret garden by a hedge. At Alum Way, I am busy in the garden: here at home I see and rest in it.

Thus the coins overlap and part. They are pentacles. The pentacle is a yantra of the bare soft earth, that I tread level in a circle with my feet, for planting. Pentacles are stars, five-petal flowers, and seals of Solomon; pentacles are magic rings. My ideas of circles of grass in squares of ground should not be applied too literally. The magic gestures are in my writing: the material and the plans are his. I watered everything yestereve copiously with Marion’s hose: but it rained a little anyway, in the night, and now the wind sings in a bright sky with leaves.

The rainbow waters of Victory descend through my flute. This is Fall – the endless falling of the Light. Light loves gravity. Light is also gravity – curved as space around the spheres. Gravity is endless and everywhere – the falling. In some parts among the stars, it condenses locally and vorticises to black holes – the birth of stars. Black holes are old collapsed stars. Their singular rebirth shines through the other side of the spangled cloth. Stars are infinite, even though they die. I am infinite, even though I die. I see above the clouds: my face is every where. Is gravity the speed of light?

The lesson of the brown pennies lying in the field, is when I see into your dark with you; I rest with your reality; it is a mystery how we touch.

In the day, the sparkle in your face breaks mine in a smile: your eyes as bright and dark as a child; your bravery in the battle field: your cock and your crisp wit like toast: your deep voice and will power in your chest and throat: your brown impulsive hands: your flaws: your broken teeth and smokers cough: your unfettered expression of your vulnerability: your emotional zest.

It is wise to keep distinct, my depth perceptions and the surface pools. They marry and entwine in time – it is the hourglass of the stars. Where I live as a membrane or sounding board, it is unwise to define too much. The circles on the water expand, contract, change shape to rods and amoebic globes, disappear and reform; the five mobile islands where Hokhmah dips his hand.

VALE

Ah! a thought while blowing out the candle: my present drift away from esoteric groups and ritual is because I am being assisted by the nature Devas whom I honour in the garden. I’m glad to be reminded of the Devas. This clarifies much, and puts the adventure in context. The Devas spell out things of life very clearly, and dispel hobnobbing.

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

Glancing back … In 2011, I studied Tarot, Alchemy, reclamation and relationship. Physically, I sanded down, varnished and restored the floors of a small concert venue in Highgate, and at the same time removed (by hand) a ten year rubbish dump from a string of neglected gardens in Alum Way near Golders Green – the task took almost 9 months. In my journal I reached ground zero and celebrated my daughter’s birthday:

21 May 2011 – ON BIRTH, HEALING AND THE GARDEN

Summer gives me a greatly extended day: getting up with full daylight, is at 5.45, earlier than ever. I finish writing between 8 and 9.30 usually; then all being well, I am active until eight or nine in the evening – how do I manage in winter? The body clock contracts accordingly, so everything adjusts. In winter I watch more TV and (obviously) sleep more, because I hit the hay about the same time.

Each morning before I write, I open the Tree of Life. I say Warren Kenton’s Invocation (“let us gather together, draw together, let us form a vessel to catch the dew of heaven. Let us rise up and go to that holy place of meeting, and gather there with the Companions of the Light; and let the veil of Heaven be drawn back. Hear this: Malkuth, Yesod, Hod …”).

With the Invocation, I do Dion Fortune’s hand mudras – The Good Shepherd, Those who Sailed West to East, The Builders – and repeat Actaeon’s vision to – “part the waves, kiss the lips, turn the wheel, fingers touch numbers of the clock, enter the cave, find the jewel, and climb the mountain, through the rainbow.”

I let it dance as a physical instrument, to earth it, feet on rosewood floor. At the end of writing, I blow out the candle and “come down the Tree.” I used to neglect this, but was taught that closure is proper. In ritual I am lazy – it is pared down to the essentials – but dedicated. This sounds right. It is a hand-clap to summon and thank the guardian angel. It diminishes my weevils and opens the sky. Ritual is a statement of embodied intention: ascent.

The drawing above, is of Dion Fortune’s mudra – three gestures with the hands were transmitted to her in trance. I drew them embedded in the slanting wave-contours of Glastonbury Tor. The peak is a mental-plane arena – ring of stones, winged angel and chalice, in a subtle vesica-pisces geometry. The vertical circles intersect the horizontal one – like my painting of the Grail Table with the Tree.

The Tor angel is a cut out silhouette window of light within the tower. Recall the silhouettes we see each other as; my day’s changing modes are silhouettes. A rare opportunity permits my intimacy with another silhouette; to deepen objectively and be aware. The invitation to enter another’s room, and vice versa, rubbing shoulders, should not spell out each others’ codes, but empathise. Our vesica pisces: the circles, as on the Tor peak, enter each other just a little. Creative imagination is the Empress dressed in green. Out she comes! lush, like an apple.

Venus is lush like an apple. Yellow, green and red, with black and blue are colours of alchemical antimony, a kind of transformational corrosive, or quickening. She is pregnant, about to parturate, seated on a stone bench – cool stone to her distended fanny. Swollen seed splits. Golden stars of the zodiac dance nonchalantly around her head; her gaze eye to eye, is direct: relationship.

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At 9.15am, thirty four years ago, I saw my daughter rotate out from my thighs, slippery, greyish dark pink, flecked with blood, vibrantly athletic and alive, her father’s face, her well formed female sex, her strong trumpet cry – the lady’s a survivor! In this light, the Angel descended through me a moment later, with an overwhelming maternal bonding instinct: love.

How perfectly it all fits together ! When a royal child lies in her cradle in the fairy tales, the godmothers who gather round, are zodiacal powers of love and of compromise – the gifts for life. They are titanic feelings. Every mother who has looked at her new child and been struck by lightning, knows them. Nature!

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Nature is the goddess – and when I next see Ris (she says she wants a quiet birthday on her own, but might change her mind later and let me take her out for a nosh), ask her a bit more about the Goddess or feminine energy she’s reading about, and the totem stick. She told me the other day, about seven daughters of Eve, and mitochondrial DNA.

7 daughters of Eve, by Ulla Plougmand Turner

Ancient women of Gaia at first trusted the masculine deity as he rose – made trade with him – and then, as he abused them, they became atheists.

When a deep perception is on the way, it is like the child coming through the canal, and my thought in-draws silently, and waits. Labour in its fullness, is the natural coming and going of the breath. My labour hurt a lot, but after I was allowed to push with it, the massive commitment with nature replaced the pain. The essence of labour is not violent, though the sensations in transition are extremely so – the waves knock against each other. The essence of labour, as during the pregnancy, guides the little voyager through the portals; she rides her vessel through oceanic storms of emotion – which there were. Whatever the mother’s argument, tension, grief or release, that little presence deep inside, is kept safe in harbour as she grows.

The ancient women of Gaia trusted the man in the field, planting grain, and he betrayed, abused and confined them.

This fable works its way organically through the soul, like a baby through the birth canal, until it is delivered to the air. When the fable is embodied, she is conscious, and may choose to forgive. For as long as there is no “for give”, it must be born again. Eventually the forgiveness – the wholeness – is accomplished, and then there is movement.

Whatever the lifetimes in my daughter’s private inner soul, unknown to me – an outline emerges; the depth of her Karmic compassion as a certain trouble took form. Her soul was emboldened to reconcile it. Her father lost his creative path in life, and abused us with his rage and disappointment. She does not wish him ill. She may have interacted with him in previous lives, as I did, or he may have been called upon by destiny to play the bully. He knew not what he did. At a certain depth, and taking time, the action of individual souls upon each other is archetypal and transformative.

For me, Karmic issues seek a conscious breath and transmutation. If an ancient woman is abused or blamed, if men exploited her, lifetimes may fill with revenge, directed outwardly or inwardly, sometimes inflicting and sometimes receiving, sometimes as the man and sometimes as the woman. Long shadows are thrown across history, for ourselves to embody with life, growth and awareness. In time a maternal environment is found, which is alchemical, and accelerates things: we meet our full nature … and let it go.

The fertile green plants all down her stair and filling her balcony, are symbolic. On my way to Warren’s meeting on Thursday evening, I saw her sitting in her doorway among them – she has an open view up to Hampstead from her roof-terrace village – and so I sent a text, and she waved back.

Karmic issues are subtle, powerful wave-trains. It is too simplistic to make them tit for tat, because they criss-cross also (as in the Nasca lines of birth chart aspect patterns); Karma is an echo chamber. When I walk in the sea with Mercury, my soul is raised enough to glimpse the divine dimension which seems to us (who live within its walls, waves and thumb-print whorls) such a labyrinth. I see the simple noble outlines, and at the same time, their complexity; a vast world. It is a great honour to behold thus: to walk in the sea with Mercury.

jane tarot template, Sun Capricorn, Ascendant Virgo – only four keys, because problem & solution are both 6. The sum of the four keys reduces also to 3, the Empress.

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I knew Key 12 was strong in her template: which means “reversal”, the capacity to invert a wrong and to change things round. The womans’ staff she told me about some weeks ago, is the caduceus or ankh. She has electricity and healing in her hands, still awakening, being born in the Year of the Snake.

The Tarot Keys are godmothers, the bringers of the forces.

In 1969 when I first knew him, a mantra arose, concerning her father Mr V: Give way to the Force. For-give. I intuited in those early months, a transgression which would be my life’s work and instruction, to forgive. I saw the tender child in him, not fully formed; and the soldiers around him. I projected furies with and through him, as well as an obsessive romance and fear. I enacted the woman bruised and scorned. In those days – he was 34 then – he was attractive, intense and tentative, feeling his way. I was fascinated by his warmth, and by the cold steel in his nature. He was vulnerable to my drama, as his ego was not secure, and his path was at a forking of the ways. I was just 20. I wanted a child with him.

The little fish who swam towards our first encounter and knocked at the door for life, was born seven years later in Gemini. She persisted and prevailed.

To forgive, does not erase from the slate – no one can do that except the bearer, with God. It goes to a hidden place and it opens wide. To forgive means to give away my enmity; to move apart; to respect that soul’s providence and freedom as a whole. To be able to forgive and move on, is a personal boon; I am not jailed, I am out on parole. To forgive is the holistic LAW OF THE UNIVERSE; and the Law is movement: and movement through the fields and seasons of life is Key 13, the “scorpio force”.

My friend Lyn is writing an autobiography of the scorpio force through herself. She told me she has trouble with the amount of “I” in it. I told her Actaeon left the I out of his first draft, and it was contrived and read badly. Perhaps the answer is, to ask from time to time what this “I” is – Self-enquiry. Then it becomes objective, and the dimension of cosmic mystery restores the Life. So why not study … the human who is closer to me than my heartbeat? All else is speculative.

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Meanwhile, at Alum Way, there is the man, my friend David. We’ve been together for five years; we are reclaiming the string of overgrown gardens next to the woods and the brook. My building of rough timber fences is now approved of by the man; with the addition of some long apple branches, the fabric starts to flow, and is strong. Yesterday I almost finished the digging. In the corner of the garden where the recent rubbish is stacked, the earth was packed with broken pots and old barbecue coals and litter, and has died to dust, it is filled with tough thatches of dead corpuscular root fibre. Nothing will want to grow there except – possibly – nasturtiums which are said to like infertile ground. It might be a good place to put the man’s fishpond. The man wants the rubbish pile remnants to be moved into the woodpile garden, away from his sight, until it can be dealt with. But the woodpile garden is my little subconscious sanctuary – as well as being the first place last year, that I entered and cleared. Why not put it further back, in the nettle garden which no one is bothering with at the moment, and cut it up into bags for the municipal dump?

looking into the tip

Before …

… and After

For me these gardening details are psychology. After digging along the border, I raked, levelled and trod a room-size area where the high rubbish tip used to be; to lay the first turf. It is incredibly exciting and creative. Around the green “mandala”, we can seed grass and wildflower, to watch it grow. I found the man in good voice with these plans in general. The place which is trod and prepared for grass, is a magical dancing floor at dusk; darker than the lumpier ground around it.

The “I” in narrative is fine, so long as the dimension is alive through it, of a story working through a local i, like a sonata through a cello.

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I’ve been reading in Self Enquiry April 2003, Jim Pym’s article on spiritual healing. It is very interesting. It is for him the attentive practice of “I do not know, nor do I try to fix it”, which clears the space for God.

The man had a bad day yesterday, with his back. He can live with a lot of physical pain, but not the fear and tension that rises to his head from it as it accumulates. His GP referred him to a pain management clinic, where they can try out drug changes. I heard (when I had toothache) that to alternate pain killers is more effective than to use just one, which habituates. He draws the line at morphine. Clive up the road wears morphine patches and he says he’s not going there. Alum Way is tenanted by brave souls in pain, crying a little in their beds at night. The Welsh lady downstairs has almost wasted away, but is as wiry as a root, thanks to the bottle. The man pulled strings through his social worker (a large black lady called Lolita whom he manipulates with great skill), and the council came along at once, and mended the steps and re-concreted the front path – he is delighted with his will with A Way. He made prints in the wet cement with stencils of a rose and a boat, and a magendovid. I told him the magendovid looks more like a paw print. He said he will make his dog walk in it. Through the ages, the cave dweller marks his dab.

Spiritual and sexual healing does not remove his pain – yet – but it does open up his resources and inner soul strength. It is a long-haul circuit. As a “soul gardener”, he manifests a physical garden and an Eve. His Aries will is powerful. My lovership with him, and in the garden, is for the whole. Does this rare opportunity stand equal with writing great screeds and getting published and influencing people?

VALE

Quantock hill waters

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

I dreamed of an enormous field of rich green grass, quite hummocky, in which just two or three big dark cows or bulls grazed abundantly. I also dreamed of a healing or esoteric adventure with some companions – we went out along the street to another house. I wore my white cotton robe. I forgot to put my shoes on, so my feet were bare on the February pavement, washed with recent snow. A younger woman held my left hand. When I woke, I thought – I am this older mature woman place space, to occupy and be her! I have no other choice in all the world.

Move into the soft and problematic space and be her conscious choice: the electron state moves into orbital wave-particle – the standwave. In fact we but rarely LIVE INSIDE OUR SELVES! We live and work and struggle around the gap. We smear the mobile displacement with cosmetics, clothes, dubious glamours and doubts.

My body of light is here and now the waterfall: the local bloodstream is connected through the subtle body, with every “other” flow of Life. Standunder the Waterfall.

On a browse in blogland, I dropped onto this image of a white waterfall. For anyone in my concern, surround them with the descending White Water light. It is beautifully simple. For my unwanted thoughts and worries, bathe them likewise. Deluge them with light and the lemon tree.

And what is animism? The awakened human root in nature … plants, soils, weathers, smells and stars … the moon bathes the land’s poetry, dark trees, nine cold sea waves to swim under; the fiery potions of soil, the song of the blood. These are earthy pulsating impressions of the Spirit – Venus hula-hoop. My aura begins to heal – shadows to pass. When aura is well she is vibrant, of a springy turfy rainbow mixture. Then the river in my local body flows, rich in loam, sorceries and silence, irrigating roots of all the Trees.

At other times of the day, she feels old, flat, tired and smudgey.

I watched on TV a Grand Design about a couple restoring a remote ruined castle in Yorkshire – a fragile shell: grass and small trees crumbled its remaining turrets. They had to contend with the Saturnine slow plod of English-heritage permissions, archaeology and extra cost. They were at the edge of financial ruin. The inside of the castle collapsed to rubble during the work. But the masonry and new stonework – dovetailed delicately into the old, during two years of Yorkshire weather and mud – was wonderful to see. The ruin transformed to a home of enduring Beauty. They had to make it into a classy b&b to pay for itself and the long labour of love. They are in hock for the rest of their lives. It has a wonderful open view of green undulating grass, trees and cattle – not a house or hedge to be seen.

Think of someone and – silently, see the Tree. No more is necessary. Lilies are also sorrow. The Tree of Life is the waterfall of light up and down … any problem small or large. White waterfall, green tree.

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In conversation with the devas, white witches give the same time and concentration to their altars and the Moon’s journey and the festivals, that I do to my writing. My writing is a daily “shrine”, a little of which I share. For the umpteenth time – resolve to keep my house cleaner and tidier and more cherished, get some regular domestic habits …

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On Separation, but Pushing Upward

Why do I feel sad and bitter and weak? Why so dragged down? I should be relieved and energised, having decided! – having discussed, agreed, and to keep in touch – it is time to let go of each other, and move on.

Logic cannot fathom the tones, and the links and pathways a partnership forms, however unconventional or difficult; the years and days of expectation, bonds of joy, anger, confusion, toil and love, grown organic in the psychic body like the green-stuff in the crumbling castle turrets – all stored by repetition in the subconscious.

At this level, bereavement drags my steps. Oh! All the protect-him hassle! That is a tough old rope which binds, but it dawns on me, that seeing the cookie crumble, he shrugs shoulders and does not grieve, nor miss me. He is an adventurer, and the time for a new adventure dawns.

It was a task of the soul. The love I gave to his trouble, over the years, reaches its mark, about now. Does he recognise this, or thank me? No. But he does thank God – and that is the whole point. He thanks God for his inner strength. The soul we “practice with” keeps God in sight. Of course I am personally FURIOUS that he says I am and always was, selfish. This helps me “wash that man out of my hair”.

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A few nights ago, I dreamed I saw many foxes in a London field … more and more appeared, behind each others’ sylvan comings and goings in the grass and the sly street. The Fox and the Owl are my old familiars.

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There is also an ebbing of … the familiar creative pulsating tide which fills my mornings and in the afternoon is an empty beach. A male YANG half – a binary I was used to being part of – fades away from my side. The process is matter of fact; the fragility tenuous and tenacious. I find it helpful to contemplate that a projected YANG is gone, leaving a space beside my YIN. Now! Wherever I am on my way to, the details come in one by one, to take care of. Recognising my writing is my prayer and craft – no need to load my shrine, but perhaps watch again the planets and Moon around the zodiac … new practice. What is this part of me now available for?

I Ching I think!

The oracle refines and reiterates the Water over Water I got last weekend. This morning, 46, Pushing Upward – earth over the wind – dissolves to 29, the Water over Water again. The abyss, the ravine, the river’s destiny.

Wood (the wind trigram) pushes upward through Earth – a vertical effort with the Will. Modesty, adaptability – the time is propitious. Heap up small things one by one, to achieve the high and great, without haste and without rest.

Old Yang in 3rd changes to Yin: I push upward into an empty city! It proceeds with ease – profit by the propitious moment.

Old Yin in 5th, all used-up, changes to Yang-creative-tangible – keep sober, step by step as if hesitant. The Earth trigram floods to the strong current of water/dangerous. The wind of the wood blows steadily up through the winter ground, the open YIN earth. The movement is into the power of a great river flowing (hexagram 29).

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The wind is the Tree of Life, whose roots are nourished by the Great Water. You don’t have to cross the great water, for you already are. The old sages of the Tao appeared hesitant, YIN and shy. They ford the streams cautiously. The cosmos flows through them unobstructedly. This is the Power – when the personal power seems at her lowest ebb.

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To honour my YIN fragility feeling in full, permits spontaneous YANG. Pushing upward is the YIN way of invincible growth, as in February’s spring …

Tao T’ai Ching 15

“The ancient adepts of the Tao were subtle and flexible, profound and comprehensive. Their minds were too deep to be fathomed. Because they are unfathomable, one can only describe them vaguely by their appearance.

“Hesitant like one wading a stream in winter; timid like one afraid of his neighbours on all sides; cautious and courteous like a guest; yielding like ice on the point of melting, simple like an uncarved block; hollow like a cave; confused like a muddy pool …

“And yet who else could quietly and gradually evolve from the muddy to the clear? Who else could slowly but steadily move from the inert to the living?

“He who keeps the Tao does not want to be full. But precisely because he is never full, he can always remain like a hidden sprout, and does not rush to early ripening.

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.